In his book Focus: The Future of Your Company Depends On It, Al Ries again and again insists that the secret to success in any company is focus. He has countless examples of companies gone bad and companies gone good, and in each case, the problem or the solution was focus. Unfortunately, to my mind, his logic is often over-simplified, especially after reading Good to Great last year, the conclusions of which were backed up with lots of hard data. Mr. Ries sometimes makes it sound like the future success of a company is easy to predict -- just figure out if they are focused.

The book is pretty old -- written in the mid-90's -- and I found myself wishing that I had a better idea of how the companies he mentions have done over the past eight years. From what little I know, many of his predictions seemed fairly accurate; in particular, his advice to IBM to go "open" with UNIX was spooky, since I had just seen a wacky television commercial where IBM promotes Linux… Still, any business book that predates the dot-com boom and bust can't help but seem outdated.

In any case, the book does give interesting arguments against diversification, line extensions, "broadening the base," etc., and for specialization, not overextending brands, and "deepening the ditch". He often suggests giving up business in order to bring narrow focus to a certain segment, and insists that bigger is not better. Rather, his indicator of success seems to be the ratio of profits to revenues, which seems reasonable, at least from a shareholder's point of view.

All in all, the book was a success in that it got me thinking about these issues. It's a very easy book to read, and was a good catalyst for my own thinking about how we could improve our focus here at my company.